


In Accord, Part One - On the run

by ninemoons42



Series: In Accord [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Archery, Assassins & Hitmen, Gen, Inspired by Art, Medieval Medicine, Swords & Fencing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-01
Updated: 2012-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-30 11:30:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42





	In Accord, Part One - On the run

  


title: In Accord, Part One - On the run  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
word count: approx. 2150 in this installment  
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]  
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr  
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]  
notes: It all started with [this](http://jamesorangecat.tumblr.com/post/15666553689/this-is-for-the-lovely-k-a-belated-holidays-gift), which led to [this](http://tumblr.com/ZIJNMxEexf0P) [which forms the second part of this first chapter], and then there was [this](http://fassyfaceavoythere.tumblr.com/post/15721726522/charles-stops-and-looks-him-straight-in-the-eyes). So yes. I thought I was done with swords-and-sorcery fantasy stuff after my X-Men Big Bang [[Crucible](http://archiveofourown.org/series/12953)], but this is a story that's got its hooks in me and I think it's going to take me to all kinds of interesting and amazing and dark places. These are not the Charles and Erik you think you know.  
Work in Progress. Please heed the rating.

  
He runs, and his shoulder burns like fury.

Shouts behind him. Shadows shift and fall. He stops and he tries to catch his breath. The footsteps in his wake are too close, too numerous, and far too easy to beguile, to lead astray.

That seems to be his lot in life.

Erik scrambles up toward a rooftop, and he sends a few bits of stone skittering down into the street. He pulls his cloak more closely around himself, and he wills himself to disappear, to fall into the scant safety and shelter of his temporary hiding place.

He has to move his timetable up a little, now. Just enough time to get to one of his boltholes, just enough time to call in a handful of vital favors. He has to leave, now, and perhaps it might be good to avoid the cities for a while. The others prefer to live and work in the teeming underbellies, where it is just as easy to appear and make a name as it is to vanish and change again.

It will be difficult out in the fields and the wild forests, but not unmanageable. He thinks he can survive out there - almost as well as he can in this city - so long as he keeps his wits around him.

First things first. He's dead if he stays here, dead if he leaves a trail to follow. Bandages and salve for the stab wound in his shoulder. He has just enough supplies for the barest idea of first aid; if the stab wound had been any deeper, if it had been an arrow, he'd have to ask someone for a favor, and he can't afford that right now. He pulls the knots tight, holding one end of the makeshift bandage in his good hand and pulling at the other end with his teeth.

The pain brings a brief moment of harsh clarity and he remembers, almost exactly, a message from a healer: a contract. Terms to be discussed.

He remembers the wear and tear on the note, the condition of the messenger bird.

It is an easy decision to make; checking on the offer will mean getting out of the city, will mean getting away from the hunters, and as soon as this wound stops hurting he'll be more than prepared to deal with anyone sent after him.

He grits his teeth; a flash of pain as he drops to the flagstones, but he manages to keep his footing and jog in the direction of the city gates. Out. Away. Not to safety; there is no such place. Toward a task to complete.

///

He stops for a drink of water, and for a catnap. He covers his tracks. He sharpens his sword and keeps the edges on his knives razor-sharp; he makes sure his hands are always in plain sight.

His wound heals, slowly. He keeps pressure on it, and he washes it when he can by holding a cloth soaked in clean cold water over it to sluice the scabs and blood away. He runs out of medicine, but by then the wound no longer bleeds so freely, and it no longer hurts to change the bandages.

He thinks of a story. He's on his way home. The word has no meaning to him, but it could stop other people asking questions.

His shoulders shake with tension. His hands are absolutely steady.

He traces out a wide path but keeps his eyes on the south. He wants to look into that offer; he still has the message in his pocket, even though he has also committed the words to memory.

He passes several nights without incident; he manages to sleep and to hunt for food, though game is scarce and what is out there is itself foraging, and not always successfully. Still, he's used to lean rations and to uncertain meals, and he's always been smart. He eats what he can, when he can; he steals winter fruit when it can't be missed.

He never, never relaxes. This is not a change.

///

The wind changes, slowly, and begins to blow strange scents his way.

Erik fends off two more attacks as he passes a large town; he manages to evade them long enough to check one of his own caches. There are no new messages, but he does sigh with relief to have a little more money, a much warmer cloak, and a stiletto to carry in his boot.

At daybreak, three nights out, they strike.

///

Duck. Weave. Breathe.

There isn't enough space for him to swing, not with the first thug crowding him. Erik switches, as fast as he thinks, tactics racing through his mind, and he draws one of his knives - he drives it into his current assailant's throat, all the way to the hilt and he yanks it out, and on the backswing clubs another man with the pommel.

Now he has some room.

Erik smiles, wolfishly, and he dispatches a third thug with a single stroke to the heart.

He turns. There's one more shadow moving at the edges of his vision, and he's halfway to dropping and lunging when there's a sudden soft sharp cry: "Stay down!"

He's heard that tone of command before, and he follows it, blindly, trusting that the order had been for him. He freezes in place, half on his knees on the forest floor.

Something flies past his cheek, so close, that could have been him - but the man who'd been slithering in to stab Erik in the back cries out and goes down. White-fletched arrow in the thug's shoulder.

Erik glances briefly over his shoulder - there is a slender shape behind him, still in the act of drawing a longbow, and that could be friend or foe but he has more pressing matters to attend to first. He strides to the thug with the arrow in his shoulder, leans over him, and casually presses the tip of his stiletto to the throat. "Who sent you after me?"

The thug growls, looks away, and says nothing.

Erik shrugs, increases the pressure on the stiletto - and then there's a hard hand wrapping around his wrist, and he doesn't think, just moves - just tries to evade and get back to his feet. No such luck; Erik cries out in pain, suddenly, and then he's down on one knee.

The grip is punishing for just a moment - and then the shadow looming over him releases him and moves away. Erik finally manages to get a good look at the other fighter.

Bow in the right hand and propped against his shoulder; a fresh arrow in the left - the same hand that had gripped Erik's arm so strongly. Where does he get that strength from, Erik wonders, looking over the slender frame, and upwards - and when he gets to the other fighter's face, Erik almost has to catch his breath in surprise.

The first thing that catches his attention is the blue of his eyes: blue as the sky before a storm, blue as deep water. Lips as red as freshly spilled blood. But more compelling are the scars: three perfectly parallel lines running over the left cheekbone.

Erik catches a glimpse of a more recent mark, more vivid, more damning; he knows it from corpses, from those who had died for justice or for penance or for remorse. The collar of a hanged man, the rope burns from a hangman's noose, just barely hidden by the cloth wrapped around the other man's throat.

That material moves as the man pulls it to cover the scar more completely. And then he speaks: "Your name, please."

"Who wants to know," Erik says.

"I hired a swordsman, and I have been waiting for him, and his name is Erik."

Erik looks sharply at him. "The message I received came from a healer."

"That's me." He stretches a hand out to Erik. "I'm Charles. From the next town over. You've caused me to worry, you know - you were supposed to be here two days ago."

"I have been traveling with a wound. And as for these," and Erik gets up, waving a hand around to take in the clearing and the bodies, "you can see these were part of why I've been delayed." He takes refuge in bitter humor; it is almost an instinct for him now, as ingrained as the need for a backup blade.

"Yes, I suppose there is that. But hello. You ought to come with me now. We've food, and I can see to your wound - "

Erik watches Charles throw back his light cloak and - yes, now he can believe the man's claim to be a healer. Tell-tale roll of bandages tied to his belt, and leather kit bag that clinks when he moves.

A healer with a longbow, who is skilled enough to incapacitate.

Erik motions over his shoulder to the dead and the dying. "And them?"

"Oh, if you insist," Charles says.

Erik watches Charles attend to the man he wounded - he presses a bottle full of blue liquid to his lips and then the thug's head lolls back, clearly and suddenly unconscious, and Charles's hands move quickly, efficiently, as he breaks the arrow in two, pulls out the two parts, and dresses the wound.

When he's finished, he absently examines the point on the arrowhead, and then drops it back into the quiver at his hip. "Shall we be off?"

"You're just going to leave him here?" Erik asks, surprised.

Charles smiles, mischievous and full of dark intent, and Erik almost wants to step away from him in sudden foreboding. "I gave him something to make him forget."

"Should I be worried that you will do something similar to me? Especially since you've offered to see to my wound?"

"I care not a whit for that man," Charles says as he strides past. "You, however, are another matter completely. And I will give you any oath you require that I will do nothing like that to you, now or ever."

Erik watches Charles maneuver silently, unhampered by his longbow or by his bag, and he finds himself falling into step behind him.

"Come along; we're about a day away from my village. Do you wish to discuss the terms of your employment now, Erik, or will you wait until then?"

"Now is good," Erik says, and why does he feel like he can trust this man? A man full of surprises, and not all of them good ones, not if Erik takes his potions and that scar into consideration.

"Are you...amenable to taking orders from me, then? Or if not orders, will you live under the same rule I hold myself to?" Charles asks, as though reading his mind.

Erik narrows his eyes. A dangerous question, and a necessary one. But the more he looks at Charles the more he begins to respect him. A protector by most definitions of the word, if not all of it. He moves with certainty, with strength, and Erik has seen his kind before.

Erik has been around people like Charles ever since he could hold a sword. Granted, some of them have been less than honorable, and at least one of them has tried to kill him.

Something tells him that if Charles ever decides to turn against him, it would be for a reason that they both knew was needed and right, and somehow that seems to be enough.

He thinks it over as they ford a small stream - and then, at last, he says, "If what you propose suits me."

Charles throws him a smile, sudden and sunny, the scars on his face folding into that smile, seeming to improve on it. "That does seem fair. Very well, here are the terms. They are few, but absolute. You are hired to protect me and mine, and to guard those who are in my care. You may employ such strategies and tactics as you are accustomed to using in your usual line of work.

"Save one."

Erik raises an eyebrow at Charles's back. "And that is?"

Charles stops, and turns, and looks Erik straight in the eyes. "You may not kill."

Erik stares. He is a man with a sword, who knows how to use that sword, who has known nothing else besides the sword. A man who considers death a constant companion and an eventual destination. He is a sell-sword, and this healer just might be a fool after all.

He believes in these things, knows them in his hands, in his very bones - and yet he finds himself replying: "As best I can."

The answer to that is Charles turning back to him again. A strange and matchless understanding in those storm-blue eyes. "That is all I ask."  



End file.
